human Kind - Village Magazine

72 February 2016

human

Kind

New research shows

we are good people,

tolerating bad things.

by George Monbiot

ENVIRONMENT

o you ﬁnd yourself thrashing against the tide

of human indifference and selﬁshness? Are

you oppressed by the sense that while you

care, others don’t? That because of human-

kind’s callousness, civilisation and the rest

of life on earth are basically stuffed? If so, you are not

alone. But neither are you right.

A study by the Common Cause Foundation, due to be

published next month, reveals two transformative ﬁnd-

ings. The ﬁrst is that a large majority of the 1000 people

they surveyed – 74% – identify more strongly with

unselﬁsh values than with selﬁsh values. This means

that they are more interested in helpfulness, honesty,

forgiveness and justice than in money, fame, status and

power. The second is that a similar majority – 78% –

believes others to be more selﬁsh than they really are.

In other words, we have made a terrible mistake about

other people’s minds.

The revelation that humanity’s dominant character-

istic is, er, humanity will come as no surprise to those

who have followed recent developments in behavioural

and social sciences. People, these ﬁndings suggest,

are basically and inherently nice.

A review article in the journal Frontiers in

Psychology points out that our behaviour towards

unrelated members of our species is “spectacularly

unusual when compared to other animals”. While

chimpanzees might share food with members of their

own group, though usually only after being plagued

by aggressive begging, they tend to react violently

towards strangers. Chimpanzees, the authors note,

behave more like the Homo economicus of neoliberal

mythology than people do.

Humans, by contrast, are ultra-social: possessed of

an enhanced capacity for empathy, an unparalleled

sensitivity to the needs of others, a unique level of con-

cern about their welfare and an ability to create moral

norms that generalise and enforce these tendencies.

Such traits emerge so early in our lives that they

appear to be innate. In other words, it seems that we

have evolved to be this way. By the age of 14 months,

children begin to help each other, for example by hand-

ing over objects another child can’t reach. By the time

they are two, they start sharing things they value. By

the age of three, they start to protest against other peo-

ple’s violation of moral norms.

A fascinating paper in the journal Infancy reveals that

reward has nothing to do with it. Three to ﬁve-year-olds

74% Identify more strongly

with unselﬁsh values than

with selﬁsh values

74%

February 2016 73

are less likely to help someone a second time if they

have been rewarded for doing it the ﬁrst time. In other

words, extrinsic rewards appear to undermine the

intrinsic desire to help. (Parents, economists and gov-

ernment ministers, please note). The study also

discovered that children of this age are more inclined

to help people if they perceive them to be suffering, and

that they want to see someone helped whether or not

they do it themselves. This suggests that they are moti-

vated by a genuine concern for other people’s welfare,

rather than by a desire to look good. And it seems to be

baked in.

Why? How would the hard logic

of evolution produce such out-

comes? This is the subject of

heated debate. One school of

thought contends that altruism is a

logical response to living in small

groups of closely related people,

and evolution has failed to catch up

with the fact that we now live in

large groups, mostly composed of

strangers. Another argues that

large groups containing high

numbers of altruists will outcompete large groups

which contain high numbers of selﬁsh people. A third

hypothesis insists that a tendency towards collabora-

tion enhances your own survival, regardless of the

group in which you might ﬁnd yourself. Whatever the

mechanism might be, the outcome should be a cause

of celebration.

So why do we retain such a dim view of human

nature? Partly, perhaps, for historical reasons. Philoso-

phers from Hobbes to Rousseau, Malthus to

Schopenhauer, whose understanding of human evolu-

tion was limited to the Book of Genesis, produced

persuasive, inﬂuential and catastrophically mistaken

accounts of “the state of nature” (our innate, ancestral

characteristics). Their speculations on this subject

should long ago have been parked on a high shelf

marked “historical curiosities”. But somehow they still

seem to exert a grip on our minds.

Another problem is that – almost by deﬁnition – many

of those who dominate public life have a peculiar ﬁxa-

tion on fame, money and power. Their extreme

self-centredness places them in a small minority, but,

because we see them everywhere, we assume that they

are representative of humanity.

The media worships wealth and power, and some-

times launches furious attacks on people who behave

altruistically. In the Daily Mail recently, Richard Little-

john described former Labour leadership candidate

Yvette Cooper’s decision to open her home to refugees

as proof that “noisy emoting has replaced quiet intel-

ligence” (quiet intelligence being one of his deﬁning

qualities). “It’s all about political opportunism and

humanitarian posturing,” he theorised, before boast-

ing that he doesn’t “give a damn” about the suffering

of people ﬂeeing Syria. I note with interest the platform

given to people who speak and write as if they are

psychopaths.

The consequences of an undue pessimism about

human nature are momentous. As the Common Cause

Foundation’s survey and interviews reveal, those who

have the bleakest view of humanity are the least likely

to vote. What’s the point, they reason, if everyone else

votes only in their own selﬁsh interests? Interestingly,

and alarmingly for people of my political persuasion, it

also discovered that that liberals tend to possess a

dimmer view of other people than conservatives do. Do

you want to grow the electorate? Do you want progres-

sive politics to ﬂourish? Then spread the word that

other people are broadly well-intentioned.

Misanthropy grants a free pass to the grasping,

power-mad minority who tend to dominate our political

systems. If only we knew how unusual they are, we

might be more inclined to shun them and seek better

leaders. It contributes to the real danger we confront:

not a general selﬁshness, but a general passivity. Bil-

lions of decent people tut and shake their heads as the

world burns, immobilised by the conviction that no one

else cares.

You are not alone. The world is with you, even if it has

not found its voice.

This article ﬁrst appeared in the Guardian.

www.monbiot.com

As the Common Cause

Foundation’s survey and

interviews reveal, those

who have the bleakest

view of humanity are the

least likely to vote

78% believe others to

be more selﬁsh than

they really are

78%